tech

In these days without music, while we quietly reflect on the destruction of the past, and our hopes for the future, the lack of noise can be a blessing – and a distraction. If you need background noise while you work, a shiur is a good choice. Baruch Hashem, the Torah world is thriving, even online, and there are no end of speeches and lessons and short divrai Torah to listen to.

Aside from the large number of Tisha B’Av related classes, this is also an opportunity to try something new – a recorded parsha class, mussar, hashkafah, or anything else that will help you get through the day. Whether you listen to them intently, or subconsciously soak up the Torah while you work, it has benefits.

I would like to give a special shout-out to the lectures of Ms. Chana Spiro (link to Torah Anytime here) for women and young ladies. I would start with her first speech, the one from 2016, and move forward from there. I listened to that speech live, and then downloaded it. It never fails to make me cry, but it a good way.

Torah Anytime also has so many other recordings for people of all ages and interests, including video recordings and live streams of some classes. If you haven’t looked at it yet, please consider it now. There is something there for everyone.

I want to express a quick, but heartfelt thank you to everyone who works on and contributes to this blog.

It makes my day to open everything up and find nicely written posts just waiting to be tagged and published. No edits, no proofing, no begging for a submission, they’re where I need them, when I need them.

I can’t express my peace of mind for knowing that all the technicalities are being managed smoothly without my needing to worry. Running a website is not easy, but my job has been halved with all the help on this aspect.

Though they’ll never appear in print, everyone who has encouraged me to keep going and given advice has a huge role here. You know who you are, and I most certainly do.

Above all, a thank you to everyone who is mentioned in the stories here – for being people who add light to the world, and for being people who appreciate the good in their lives and cannot help but share it. I cannot wait to hear more from you.

You all have my respect and appreciation, and I hope your light only shines brighter.

Today as I was walking home from school, I saw my neighbour jogging by. I usually see her in my area, and we always wave and smile at each other. She’s about my age, and sometimes we bump into each other as we’re heading to school.

I waved as usual, but instead of simply waving back, she ran across the street to me!

“Hey, what’s up?” I asked. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” she said, smiling. “Do you have a phone or a tablet?”

“Yeah,” I said. I was a bit bewildered.

Before I knew it, she pulled out a stylus and handed it to me. “I had an extra one of these and I thought you might want it.”

Just five minutes ago, I was sitting at my desk, on the computer, playing another round of mindless games—not because I needed to sit for a moment, or because I wanted the brain benefits they offer. Just because I was bored, tired, and honestly, too lazy to come up with something more productive and interesting to do.

Suddenly, it occurred to me. ‘Is this really what G-d gave me the gift of life for?’ And I realized that tired or bored, I had so many things I could be doing.

I keep a running collection of quotes, and today was ‘Quote Day,’ where I sent one or two to each close friend. At one, I was at a loss. She’d seen my entire collection recently, including some of my best ones and the ones most suited to her. I picked a couple new ones I hoped would work and sent them off.

How was I supposed to know that the first one featured a favorite of hers? And thanks to being delayed a few hours in sending, I received the reply right when I most needed cheering up.

Would you like to support Inspired By Starlight and help draw attention towards something good? Do you want to spread some light in your school or workplace? Would you like a new way of making a kiddush Hashem? Want to always have our link and email address handy?

Curtsey of the entire Starlight team and some expert advice, we now have ‘business cards’ with our web address and submissions email. To order, please email us with your address and the required amount. At the moment, we are offering these cards for free to help spread the word. Exceptions may occur for extremely large orders or remote locations– we will inform you if required.

My parents (thank you thank you thank you) bought me a tablet for use at school. One of the many ‘useful and popular’ preloaded apps (I’ve already deleted about half of them!) was a newsfeed. It was preloaded with feeds for sports, worldwide news, health and fitness, media, entertainment and other news. (Forget that there were about 3 other apps already on there that had those things. Gashmiyus! Mindless bittul zman!)

I deleted all the pre-loads, and contemplated deleting the app as well. But before I did, I decided to do one quick search. Maybe they had a creativity blog I went to occasionally? They did. And that got me thinking. And searching.

Hey! If they had interior design, why wouldn’t they have access to Torah sites as well?